


The Inherent Chaos of Cookies

by fav_littleleaf



Category: Dragon Quest XI
Genre: Baking, Established Relationship, Fluff, Found Family, M/M, Post-Canon, SoSValenslimes, no spoilers other than the presence or absence of various characters, really silly fluff lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:41:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29434023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fav_littleleaf/pseuds/fav_littleleaf
Summary: El and Erik try to bake cookies after saving the world, but things keep going wrong.
Relationships: Camus | Erik/Hero | Luminary (Dragon Quest XI)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 17
Collections: Valenslimes Day 2021





	The Inherent Chaos of Cookies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dragonquesttbh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonquesttbh/gifts).



> happy valentine’s, Eliza!!! I was so excited to get you as a slimee and I hope this can pay tribute to your delightful work. enjoy <3

The last battle to be won after Mordegon is twofold: get Erik to stop waking him with a smelly foot to the face, and bake slime cookies without burning the house down.

El is making slow progress on the first account, but the latter remains an insurmountable task.

By all rights, it’s a beautiful day in their newly rebuilt Cobblestone home. Sunbeams dance behind lace-curtained windows, propped open to welcome the fluttering trill of songbirds. A little ivy plant near the sink quivers with the breeze — _little leaves of Yggdrasil_ , Erik had called them, _to make sure you’re relaxing for once._

It was a nice thought, at least.

“El, love! Are you nearly finished? We’ll need to get started on dinner for Rab soon!”

“Nearly done,” Erik shouts from beside him, and by instinct El darts an elbow to hit him in the stomach. Erik artfully dodges. “We had to start over a few times, but it’s all good, I promise!”

Amber makes a quiet noise from across the house — she’s probably cleaning everything _again_ for Rab’s visit — but it’s perfectly clear what she means.

El grumbles and turns his attention back to the counter, whisking the eggs harder. He’s looking forward to it, actually; he hadn’t seen any of his friends in _weeks_ since the party in Arboria, and even though he lived with Erik, it still felt lonely sometimes. He missed them in ways he couldn’t describe: the warmth of Serena’s healing hand in the midst of battle, the tenor of Sylvando’s laugh among the smoky campfire in the evenings.

El sighs. Next to him, Erik starts whistling along with the birds, and a strange scratching noise makes him look over.

“Erik!” El shoots a hand out to grab hold of Erik’s wrist, which is very unnecessarily wielding a knife to chop at an unopened container of milk.

Erik heaves a dramatic sigh, but doesn’t resist when El pries his fingers from the container and twines their fingers together instead. “I gotta use it for something, Ellie. Why aren’t there any monsters to kill anymore? I’m going stir-crazy.”

“I know, but there are other things you can use it for. Maybe not cookies?” El takes a deep breath to re-route his frankly murderous feelings into affection, and he kisses Erik on the cheek. “I’m putting you on pouring duty. _Dry_ ingredients, we’re almost out of vanilla because of you.

“Fine,” Erik mutters, and turns away to rifle through the cabinets for ingredients.

El keeps an eye on him for a few minutes as he mixes butter and vanilla into his own bowl, but everything seems to be fine, so he lets his mind wander a bit. He wasn’t sure what to do about Erik’s recent antsy feelings — he shared them, to be honest. Maybe he could teach him to forge weapons. That would take care of the random knife problem, at least.

That train of thought doesn’t get far before the door slams open with a high-pitched trill, and a bark to match.

“Oh, Amber!” a voice singsongs from the front door. He doesn’t have to look to know it’s Gemma. Sandy bounds up to his side, wagging her tail and smiling goopily, and El briefly thanks Yggdrasil for dogs. “For tonight, have you gotten the —”

Gemma stops speaking abruptly. She catches El’s gaze from across the room. “Oh hello, El! I thought you’d still be… out.”

“Came back early. Erik wanted to bake cookies.”

“Yes, I _have,”_ comes the shout from the back storage room — when had Amber gone in there? — and he looks over in time to catch Erik glancing at something near the front door, but doesn’t catch what.

“Lovely, that’s all I wanted to know! Thanks mum!”

She’s gone in a flash of green and fluttering bandana, leaving El to feel like he just got swept through by a hurricane.

El turns back to his bowl, bemused, and then shakes the thought off. He just needs to add Erik’s ingredients, and the slimes, and then maybe they could be successful in their cookie endeavors for once

“Is something happening with Rab later?” El says. “Oh Yggs, I didn’t forget his birthday, did I?”

Erik doesn’t respond for a moment too long, and El glances sharply over, realizing that he’d forgotten to check if Erik was up to anything objectionable. He’s staring pensively over a bowl of blue goo on the counter, which is decidedly not a dry ingredient as instructed, but El supposes there are worse things.

“I like slimes, you know? What did they do to deserve this?”

El stares at him. “It’s a figure of speech, Erik. You know there’s not actually slimes in there.”

“I guess,” Erik sighs. Sandy approaches him, her tail cautiously wagging, and noses up at his arm. He lifts his hand to scratch her ear, and El is momentarily enthralled by the little smile that plays at his lips. “I just wanna have a nice friendly time, Sandy, is that too much to ask for?”

Sandy whines and wags her tail so hard El can feel the breeze on his arms.

“What are you _on_ about?” El stalks over to him and reaches out an arm to wrap around Erik’s waist. “You have a nice friendly time with me, all the time. Who needs slimes?”

Erik starts to answer, to pull him closer into an embrace, when El catches sight of the bowl _next_ to the slime bowl. It’s piled high in a veritable mountain of white powder.

_“What did you do?”_

El tries to wrestle away, but Erik just pulls him in and nestles against his neck. “Did what you told me to do. But the proportions seemed off, so I added more flour.”

With a groan, he extracts himself from Erik and knocks his forehead against the counter. It makes _sense_ that Erik would be this useless at things in the kitchen, given his childhood, but for Yggdrasil’s sake. He sucks in a deep breath. “I can’t believe you.”

“Ellie, I promise I —”

“You’re off duty. Go over there,” El says, straightening up and pointing to the corner, “and if you move, I _will_ sic Mia on you.”

“You want me to wear a dunce hat too?”

“Go away!”

Erik grumbles and leaves his side, but not before stealing another kiss. “Maybe I just wanted more cookies.”

“If we ever finish them, remind me to divorce you,” El shoots back, returning to his original position at the counter and trying to sort out how much of the butter, milk, and eggs to add to match the frankly absurd amount of flour and who knows what else that they had to deal with.

_It’s fine,_ he tells himself. _Everything is fine._

With Erik out of the way, the work goes quickly. He manages to clean up a bit of the mess, and even takes some of the flour out of the bowl so he doesn’t have to triple every other ingredient. Erik complains on and off as El throws it all together, and at one point he catches him trying to climb up onto Sandy to look at something out the window, but he’s quickly mollified with a scoop of cookie dough.

Finally, all the cookies are arranged and ready to go into the oven. With no small amount of glee, El opens the oven door and balances the tray on his arm. 

Just as he bends to place the tray inside, the door slams open _again._ Sandy yelps with excitement and goes tearing past El, who loses his precarious balance and — 

“Hey, losers! Oh gods, I _told_ you slime cookies stink up the whole house —”

The cookies go flying.

_“No!”_ El shouts, going down in a dive, his arms outstretched.

Erik dives at the same time, from the opposite angle, but his aim has suffered from weeks of domesticity; he collides with El mid-journey and they go skidding into a pile on the floor. The cookies follow suit, and Sandy runs toward it with pure, salivating glee.

Unamused, Mia saunters over to the counter and peers into the bowl of remaining batter. “I see you’ve been having lots of fun without me,” she says.

El sits up from the floor dizzily. His arm throbs with pain from hitting the cabinet, and he clutches it to his chest with a wince. “What are you even doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at the Academy?”

“Wow, it’s nice to see you too!”

Erik gets up too, with significantly (and unfairly) more aplomb. He drags Sandy, growling in protest, off the now half-eaten unbaked cookies. “Give him a break, Mia, it’s been a hard day.”

Mia doesn’t seem to notice; she has two fingers stuck in her mouth, dripping with slime goo. “Ew. These are gross, what _happened?”_

El sighs heavily, not even bothering to stand up and just leaning against the cabinet. There will never be slime cookies; it was just not written into the stars. “Erik happened,” he groans.

“Oh, don’t be silly, they’re fine,” Erik says. “We’ll just do another tray, no need to be dramatic.”

Mia crosses her arms as she leans against the counter. “You know Erik does actually know how to bake cookies, right?”

She suffers promptly for this proclamation when Erik tackles her, his fists connecting with her waist and stomach. “What’s wrong with you? Whose side are you on!”

“I operate alone,” she shouts, flailing under ambush, then finally getting her bearings and punching back. She catches Erik’s wrist with a well-timed flourish and uses it for leverage to push him down. As he goes, he drags her down with her, and they, too, end up in a pile on the floor. Sandy barks happily around them and jumps on top of them as well, drooling slime goo onto Erik’s face.

El stares at them, speechless. Every time he thinks the worst has happened, the chaos continues.

_“What do you mean he knows how to bake cookies?”_

Mia is too busy crying with laughter at the state of Erik, pinned under a gangly teenager and a sugary-high dog with slime between her teeth, to answer in any reasonable capacity.

“I — don’t,” Erik coughs from beneath them. “It’s,” he groans, trying to push Sandy off him at the same time as he swipes at his eyes with his sleeve, “lies, alright!”

Before El can demand answers from them — this is starting to be truly ridiculous — the door opens once more.

“Oh, _Eleven!”_ Gemma has returned, this time with a sun hat and a basket laced around her arm. “I was wondering if you could help me gather daisies for — oh, my. What’s happened here?”

“We were just discussing that, weren’t we?” Mia says, still far too cheerfully, glaring at a now-upright Erik.

“Oh, are you finally ready?” Erik says. He’s still sitting on the ground, holding the back of his head. “That took way longer than it should have.”

“Yes, we’re ready!” Gemma says.

El stands straight up, crossing his arms across his chest and doing his best to glare at all of them. “If you don’t tell me exactly what’s going on, _right now,_ I’m never giving you any of my cookies ever again.” He glares harder when Gemma and Mia just stare back at him, smiles playing at the corners of their mouths. “And not these crap cookies that Erik ‘helps’ with, I mean real cookies.”

“We have somethin’ to show you,” Gemma says. “And don’t worry about the cookies — here, have one.” She opens the basket on her arm and withdraws a blue cookie, just like the ones they had been trying to make.

El has no idea how to process anything at this point, so he lets Mia push him lightly towards the door of their house, numbly munching on a cookie which tastes far better than anything he and Erik had ever made. He doesn’t have the wherewithal to ask who made it — if it turns out it was Erik…

Gemma throws the door open, and this time El is the one walking through it, into the chilly afternoon air. 

“Your friends are here to see you,” she says, a brilliant smile on her face, gesturing towards the clearing in front of the tree that holds the Yggdrasil root.

“What?” El breathes, everything inside him going stock still.

He runs further up on the hill, trying for a better angle as a shivery feeling ripples across his whole body. As he goes, he hears music floating towards them — violins, trumpets, guitars — the same kind that Sylvando had always had his circus members play when they danced. It’s lovely, full of more _joie de vivre_ than he had felt in a long time, the harmonies twining together like autumn leaves on the breeze.

Then he sees them. 

Sylvando, Serena, Rab, Jade, all of them, even some he had met on his travels and parted ways with after far too soon. They’re talking amongst themselves, milling between a elaborate set-up of tables with a huge assortment of food, balloons, and musicians who grin at each other with every turn of phrase.

El sucks in a deep breath and goosebumps rise on his arms. “I — what? This is —”

“Holy Yggdrasil, that was difficult,” he hears Erik mutter to Mia behind him. “There’s only so many ways you can screw up cookies.”

Gemma just laughs and pushes him forward.

Earlier that day, El would have been upset to find out how deeply he had been played, but he no longer cares. Erik comes up by his side, and they share a determined nod. He breaks into a run, arms outstretched, the birds singing in concert with his heart, and he knows that he’d take a hundred failed slime cookie batches in exchange for holding all of them in his arms once more.


End file.
